Robert Benton keeping it real

Wednesday

As a child growing up during the Depression in tiny Waxahachie, Texas, Robert Benton struggled to read and write, never knowing that he was a victim of dyslexia.

Unable to understand the printed word, he found a refuge at the town’s movie house, where stories of soldiers, pirates and ruby-slippered little girls from Kansas fueled an imagination that would one day yield three Oscars -- two of them, ironically, for writing.

Those two scripts, by the way, were “Places in the Heart” and “Kramer vs. Kramer,” both Best Picture-winners that were recently included in AFI’s 100 greatest American films, as was “Bonnie and Clyde,” his first film, which he co-wrote with his then partner, David Newman.

Not bad for a kid who couldn’t read.

Even now, long after his dyslexia has been corrected, the much-praised writer-director still prefers the spoken word to print.

“Seeing ‘Singing in the Rain’ is more moving to me and impacts me more than reading ‘Trollope,’” Benton, 74, said on a recent visit to Boston. “Now that’s a shortcoming in me, because I don’t mean to downplay Trollope. I would have been a better person had I given Trollope his due. But movies formed my life.”

Just as his films formed ours. Who hasn’t been moved by his work, whether it’s a pair of Depression-era outlaws with a Robin Hood complex in “Bonnie and Clyde,” a widow struggling to hold on to her farm in “Places in the Heart,” or a father struggling to raise his young son while going through a painful divorce in “Kramer vs. Kramer”?

His secret, he says, is keeping things real. It’s a philosophy that’s served him well over a 40-year career in which he has either written or directed more than a dozen films, including “Superman: The Movie,” “What’s Up Doc?” and his latest, “Feast of Love.”

It’s a movie of multiple storylines and characters depicted by an ensemble cast headed by Morgan Freeman and Greg Kinnear. While it deals in matters of the heart, Benton stresses that it’s not a movie about romance.

“I’ll leave that to people far more skilled at such things,” he said. “I’m making a movie about love and its profound affect on the human experience.

“I think love is a desperate measure filled with mistakes. It’s a mess, but it’s the only mess we have. And I’d rather have that mess than not have it.”

Love’s dichotomy is a common theme of Benton’s movies. Almost as common as actors like Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Sally Field winning Oscars appearing in them.

Numerous other actors have received nominations, including his good friend Paul Newman, who received a nod for his performance in Benton’s “Nobody’s Fool’ in 1995.

He also cast him as the lead in his neo-noir detective story, “Twilight,” in 1998 and would loved to have had him play the aged university professor that serves as a sort of muse to the lovers at the heart of “Feast.” But Freeman already had been assigned the role when Benton came onboard.

“Normally, my nose would be way out of joint over something like that, but because it was Morgan … plus, I’ve never seen he and Paul in the same room. So I wanted to make sure they were two different people,” Benton said. “Dustin Hoffman used to say, ‘There’s acting and there’s behavior. You can’t act wit, you can’t act intelligence and you can’t act moral gravity.’ And Morgan has both the wit and the moral gravity for this role.”

He says the challenge of “Feast of Love” was finding an actor with the gavitas to go toe-to-toe with Freeman. Without that, he said it would be “like driving a Ferrari with the brakes on.”

That person was Greg Kinnear, fresh off his acclaimed performance as the sad-sack father in “Little Miss Sunshine.”

“I think of him as a modern-day version of Jack Lemmon. He has that same kind of wit and that same ability to break you heart,” Benton said.

Something else with the ability to break your heart is today’s movie industry, which he says is largely controlled by multi-national corporations like Time-Warner and Sony, where movies aren’t the main business.

“It’s always been difficult for someone to sign a check for 20 million dollars for anything that’s not proven. … But it’s become more complicated now,” said Benton. “Jack Warner may have been a monster, but he knew the movie business. That’s all he did; he made movies. He didn’t make movies and vacuum cleaners.

“When they started to make movies like they construct cars or television sets, demographics began to rule,” Benton added. “Consequently, that overreaching corporate strategy has overridden the inventiveness of the filmmakers.”

Benton believes too many of those films are targeting the lucrative demographic that encompasses males ages 14 to 21.

“That’s whom they make the movies for,” he said. “And out of necessity, certain (audiences) get left out, like middle-class people. They just don’t get movies made for them anymore. So that mentality makes it trickier, but it doesn’t make it impossible.’

To that end, Benton anticipates a sea change in the way movies are made and distributed.

“As people begin to figure out the Web and when people figure out how to make a movie with a cell phone, they’ll do something really incredible,” said Benton, who was at the forefront of the last revolution in American filmmaking 40 years ago along with fellow writer-directors Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Arthur Penn. “So while I despair about corporations, I am very hopeful about human ingenuity in defeating corporations.”

The Patriot Ledger

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